Succeeding with Social Media Roselyn Fisher and Meg Wright of the Development Office of North Shore Medical Center have built an integrated social media strategy that dramatically improved donor's support of the annual North Shore Medical Center Cancer Walk. I believe that Roselyn and Meg have designed a social media plan that is scalable for larger projects and institutions. It suggests the power of integrated social media. The goal of this video was to provide a concise assessment of the the value of social media in 2010 to increase the success of the 20-year-old NSMC Cancer Walk to the Partners Healthcare Board of Trustees. The budget was very modest. The presentation was made by Rose Fisher and Meg Wright, and shot and edited by North Shore Communications Group, Inc. Green Marketing is Pushing The Internet   January 4, 2010 This is credited entirely to the Center for Media Research, which I subscribe to, and you should, too. "Environmental Leader and MediaBuyerPlanner partnered to study Green Marketing through the audiences of five industry publications to help determine if it's a staple or a fad. The report found that 33% of respondents said green marketing was more effective than their normal marketing efforts, with just 7% saying it was less effective." 71% of firms indicated that they were in the "somewhat green" to "very green" categories, but they tended to believe their customer base thinks them less green than they really arr. This belief is persistent among the respondents, and may indicate why green marketing is on the rise. Here are some of the key findings explained in the study: 82% of respondents indicated they expect to spend more on green marketing in the future. Among manufacturers, that number is significantly higher. At least half, if not more, of respondents plan to engage in online marketing efforts in the future. 28% of marketers themselves think green marketing is more effective than other marketing messages, compared to 6% of marketers who think it is less effective. Management is even more optimistic, with 46% of them indicating a belief that green marketing is more efficacious. And the Executive Summary observes that nearly half of respondents said the decision-makers at their companies hold green marketing in high regard, compared to just 15% who hold it in low regard. Companies with decision-makers who have a low regard for green marketing tend to be those with the larger marketing budgets between $10 million and $50 million per year, where more than a quarter indicated that their decision-makers held green marketing in low regard. Smaller companies, concludes the report, may believe green marketing to be more effective than larger companies do. Additional information from the Executive Summary is available. Contact me, and I will send you the origial e-mail from Center for Media Research.   Barry O'Brien

Marketing Knowledge   Rethinking Traditional Marketing February 13, 2011 Some companies are slow to understand that traditional, well-honed “features and benefits” marketing pitches do not convert well to internet marketing. Once viewers smell an ad, they abandon these videos within the first minute. Through trial and error, internet practitioners have come to understand best practices that increase subscriber satisfaction through more relevant messaging targeted to what consumers expect. Regardless of what has worked before, you can not fight against the changing consumer expectations; it’s better to embrace the change and start creating more positive consumer experiences.  Consumers are looking for useful product-based assistance and advice.  The current reliance on user-generated content is driven by a consumer preference for video instruction presented in a non-promotional environment.  In today’s internet marketplace, keywords trump brand. Most queries are keyword specific rather than brand-oriented.  Users generally rely on the answers delivered within the top listings of major search engine result pages.  Web users search behavior is changing rapidly. Notable findings from ComScore’s report for 2009 sited that:  78.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video. The average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours. 98.9 million viewers watched 5.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (59.2 videos per viewer). 48.7 million viewers watched 367 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer). The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes. The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 10.1 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.      More and more of those search results are in the form of video.  In fact, in the US alone over 13.5 billion videos were viewed in October 2008. And of the 10.7 billion searches conducted at Google in 10/08, 2.5 billion were video searches on YouTube.com.  See: ComScore 2009 Report for full details.  The solution? Create accurate, honest product videos on-line where your product will be found by consumers. Product information should be presented accurately, but informally, using the advantage of video to demonstrate or illustrate the products features. The video should then be distributed broadly so that your message can be “discovered” by users. -- Barry O’ Brien